mlchild

Amazon’s Alexa github has a number of solid tutorials/example code

There is very much the possibility of direct revenue, stay tuned

Shameless plug: I’m the co-founder of a company building entertainment & games on Alexa and we’re hiring node.js engineers in SF Bay.

We are seed funded and looking to continue growing our user numbers and team, email me if you want to hear more!

Good points in both cases. For approach #1, I do think the Google example is somewhat analogous—ideally we'd survey all existing options more and more effectively, and explicitly call-out our "sponsored links." The incentives are more clearly aligned with the seekers in approach #2, but we're still in the early stages of exploring the willingness-to-pay or willingness-to-revenue-share of our users.

Our near-term goal is to grow the pool of seekers as quickly as possible and test the viability of both approaches. Having worked on some products that people like-but-don't-love, this one is much easier to market because the users genuinely love it.

At the moment, this is mostly the service we offer, although we have done some extra work for our early users (resume reviews, interview prep). But the listings are hand-picked by a competent human, we do it for free, and we aren't trying to push you into companies that we are hired by. Going forward, we're hoping to expand the pool of job-seekers and companies we work with so that we can offer job opportunities that aren't publicly available.

There's two ways we think this could go:

1. We make money from companies via recruiting fees. In this scenario, our goal would be to present listings that we make money from via "sponsored links" a la Google search. As we grow our pool of job-seekers, we'd concurrently be able to expand the number of companies we have recruiting agreements with, thus making our implicit incentive to be biased towards a small number of companies weaker and weaker. If we got a significant portion of all job-seekers using our service, we'd probably be able to introduce a standardized recruiting agreement that companies could sign onto online in a self-serve fashion, minimizing our need to do "on the ground" sales.

2. If that approach doesn't work, we'd hope to offer services to job-seekers that they're willing to pay for, such as resume reviews, interview coaching, and the like. There's also the possibility that we could come to some agreement with seekers for a (very small) percentage of their signing bonus/salary at a new job that we help them find. Obviously we have to provide excellent service to earn this, but that's what we aim for!

I'm intrigued by your comments that you're interested in funding social networks—it seems like a new one launches on Product Hunt every day, but few are able to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem and achieve scale.

What's your take on the best way to make the network useful on day one for a small number of users? What are you looking for in a YC app for a social network (with or without traction)?

Right now we have it set up to create live chats between Slack teams, but if you're interested in a web-hosted version of the chat, that's good to know for our next feature to work on!

This piece is awesomely detailed, but if you're looking for a higher-level recap, we wrote up the a16z podcast on the same topic: http://www.volleythat.com/a16z-podcast/2015/10/18/a16z-podca...

Not sure why it's incorrect, and turning on/off the automatic synchronization in Settings doesn't seem to do anything.

I'd still love to hear Peter Thiel and PG duke it out/reconcile the "choose an idea that avoids competition at all costs" vs. "don't worry about competition at all" messages.

Yeah, pretty much, although the group comprises everyone who has the app.

Hey, one of the Streak makers here. I would say we had the idea to do a trivia game before Trivia Crack, but who would believe me?

I agree that 99% of the time instant gratification is what you want from a trivia game, but we dream of many many people playing at once, which would be pretty unique, no?

Not to kneejerk defend Taleb, but I believe his stated position is that he loses money on his trades almost all the time, and then makes it all back and more when a black swan event occurs. I don't believe a black swan has occurred in the treasury market in the last 5 years, so it would be interesting to hear if he's still waiting for one there.

First off, wanted to say thanks to Nick and Grant for the most amazing meal of my life at Alinea, as well as several killer nights at Next and the Aviary (I was an instant convert and had to get season tickets).

Secondly, this write up is incredibly rich and I really appreciated the chance to get so much insight into the success of the system so far. That said, I'm particularly interested in the next moves.

You note that the network effects of OpenTable for discovery are waning, thanks to Google, but I'm not sure that's the case on desktop, and even less so on mobile. The cases I experience are:

1. I know exactly where I want to eat. In this case it's almost always easier to go to OpenTable anyway, since restaurant website design is clunky and unpredictable.

2. I have a general idea, say "mid-range Cal-Ital on Thursday." Google may be superior to OpenTable on recommendations (slightly, and I think that's debatable), and it doesn't really matter if they do a better job pulling up, say, Nopa and Rich Table, since I'm not getting in anyway. OpenTable shortens the loop between idea and execution.

3. I have no idea where I want to eat, other than, "right here, right now, and good." In this case superior mobile recommendation apps carry the day, many of which I can book through, usually via OpenTable's platform. With extensions/deeplinks/etc. picking up on Android and iOS, it seems likely that this will be further entrenched.

I like the idea of more flexible and innovative reservations systems taking hold, but I'm not sure I'd discount the network effects so soon.

Finally, the kiosks in restaurants that are provided (some might say forced in) by OpenTable seem like ripe opportunity, given the horrific UI and vendor lock-in. Are you considering building an iPad/tablet app to manage your systems in-restaurant? Or is the browser interface sufficiently mobile-friendly to serve this purpose?

Thanks again for the write-up, really enjoyed the read. Looking forward to Next Chinese.

Really interesting. Complicated, but really interesting.